publicdomainreview.orgadded August 2026
Public Domain Reviewby Anne Lawrence-Mathers23d ago
Centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning.
Public Domain Reviewby Thea Applebaum Licht23d ago
New Jersey’s Atlantic City emerged as a booming Edwardian seaside destination in the 1870s. From its famed boardwalk (the first in the United States), tourists could reach hotels and restaurants...
Public Domain Reviewby Joobin Bekhrad24d ago
Addressing the Bombay Anthropological Society on the night of November 30, 1892, its then-president — George Waters, a British surgeon and lieutenant colonel — discussed a rather esoteric work: a...
Public Domain Reviewby Thea Applebaum Licht14 Jul 2026
In the summer of 1956, the Beat writer Jack Kerouac ascended the North Cascade Mountains, climbing up through the glacial crests of Washington State to Desolation Peak, where he would assume a...
Public Domain Reviewby Arnoud S Q Visser8 Jul 2026
Pompous know-it-alls were once a mainstay of mockery on the Italian stage. Arnoud Visser investigates this stock character of the pedant and his association with individual superiority, social...
Public Domain Reviewby Erica X Eisen8 Jul 2026
“This magazine . . . does not represent a group. It represents, rather, a movement, a spirit” — or perhaps a “specter”?
Public Domain Reviewby Ross MacFarlane7 Jul 2026
George Eliot’s Middlemarch is famed for its well-rounded characters, yet the unfortunate Edward Casaubon, a pedantic clergyman more devoted to his research than his intelligent wife Dorothea...
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit30 Jun 2026
If you were a nineteenth-century merchant bringing diamonds from the Kollur Mine near Bezawada (now Vijayawada) to Golconda (now Hyderabad), going northwest along the Krishna River, your best bet...
Public Domain Reviewby Richard Fallon17 Jun 2026
Arguably the first work of fiction to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex, Louis Pope Gratacap’s The New Northland (1915) is at once kaleidoscopic, mischievous, fascinating — and exhausting.
Public Domain Reviewby Hunter Dukes17 Jun 2026
Their capacity for flight is magical, almost animate, reflected in the names by which they are known around the world.
Public Domain Reviewby Thea Applebaum Licht11 Jun 2026
Before crowds jostled for biennale parties and gondola rides, Venice’s waterways witnessed scenes of an even more violent kind — “La Serenissima” this was not.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit10 Jun 2026
“This is an age of formulations”, the actress Genevieve Stebbins declared in 1886. Auguste Comte had formulated positivism in science, Henry Thomas Buckle had done the same for history, and Herbert...
Public Domain Review9 Jun 2026
Running from 9th to 24th June, this is a vital two week period in which we raise a huge portion of the funds to keep us going for the next year.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit3 Jun 2026
It is hard to tell, at first glance, what information is being imparted. A tuft of grass emerges from a rounded pile, which is sectioned like a table.
Public Domain Reviewby Thom Sliwowski28 May 2026
In the Middle Ages, rumours spread across Europe of a strange hybrid creature, half-animal, half-plant, known as the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. A hoax based on fern rhizomes?
Public Domain Reviewby Thea Applebaum Licht26 May 2026
Today, the Coronado Flower Show, hosted each spring in the small San Diego Bay resort town for which it is named, is the largest tented flower show in the United States.
Public Domain Reviewby Urte Laukaityte21 May 2026
In the parish of Uig on the Scottish island of Lewis, a woman is caring for her cattle not far from a cemetery.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit19 May 2026
The scene is almost surreal: boys in collared shirts chasing a giant ball across a field. In one picture, the ball fills a horse-drawn cart; in another, it blots out an entire human being, save...
Public Domain Reviewby Alex Wright13 May 2026
Before Linotype revolutionised typesetting in the 1880s, compositors set texts by hand — and they set them fast.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit13 May 2026
Toward the end of Willem ten Rhijne’s (1647–1700) De Acupunctura, the Dutch physician narrates what appears to be the first time he saw the acupuncture procedure performed.
87%